


Just Another Awesome Story

by MorganOfTheFey



Series: OTP: Bats and Butterflies [5]
Category: Fallout 4
Genre: F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Light BDSM, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, some references to torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-17
Updated: 2016-04-17
Packaged: 2018-06-02 21:38:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,585
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6583546
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MorganOfTheFey/pseuds/MorganOfTheFey
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Anna rescues Deacon from being captured and tortured by raiders, and he wants to go into a scene immediately afterward to cope with what happened. She takes care of him and shows him that he's safe now. Basically the ultimate hurt/comfort fic.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Just Another Awesome Story

**Author's Note:**

> Hey, just so you know, the bad stuff at the beginning goes by super fast and none of the torture happens "on screen." There are also a few lines that imply Deacon may have been sexually assaulted too, so trigger warning for that, but again it's only a reference and doesn't actually happen within the fic. Just giving you guys a heads up in case anyone is sensitive to that sort of thing!

This is going to be such a great story.

The raider hits Deacon again, knocking his head to the side so quickly he’s dizzy just from that without the force of the blow.

Yeah, a really awesome story.

The raider says something to him, but he doesn’t bother listening. The knife makes another appearance. Deacon tries to make his eyes as flat and reflective as his sunglasses as he stares back at the other man. His lens are long gone, broken and left behind somewhere when he was captured.

Aaand now the knife is right next to his eyeball. Losing an eye will make a nice story. Plus, patches are very cool and sexy. Yeah, it’s not going to be that bad at all. Nothing to worry about. Soon this will just be another story that no one will even believe.

Deacon barely believes it himself when Anna kicks down the door like some kind of avenging angel. The biblical kind, that have sixteen wings and a lion’s head and eyes all over their body. That death-personified freaky shit.

The retribution Anna delivers is both biblical and strangely anti-climatic. She kills so nonchalantly and the fight is over so quickly that Deacon almost misses it because he’s just so goddamn tired. It’s not like the raiders bothered to feed him and the only water he got was what he inhaled when they were waterboarding him, so he’s a little out of it. For one terrible second he wonders if he’s actually just hallucinating this, but then Anna is kneeling in front of him, close enough that he can let himself fall forward into her arms. His forehead rests against her shoulder instead of faceplanting on the concrete.

This is real.

Anna reaches around him, and she’s saying the “safe” mantra. It’s always three sentences, short ones, and the last sentence is “the door is locked.” Doesn’t matter whether or not there is a door, she tells him it’s locked, and that’s their code for “it’s safe.” He only understands that one because he expects it to be there, but he can’t catch the other two sentences. He’s pretty sure she’s speaking English, but her words are only sounds to him. She cuts the rope tying his ankles together, but he jerks in her grip before she can cut the ropes binding his wrists behind his back.

“Don’t,” he tells her.

Anna immediately stops. “Что не так?”

Deacon distantly registers that she’s switched to Russian, so she must be worried. She asked him what was wrong, and he should try to explain, but he’s too busy reveling in the fact that he told her not to and she stopped. He doesn’t do anything but breathe that in for a minute. It’s been … he doesn’t actually know how long the raiders had him. Sloppy of him to lose track like that. At least a full day. Twenty four hours or more of having no control over his situation, of being helpless to stop what was happening.

“Have sunglasses,” Anna says quietly, in English.

Deacon lets out a shaky breath that turns into a silent—and maybe slightly hysterical—laugh against her shoulder. Everything is going to be OK. It’s all over now. He lived through the bad part, it’s done, and now all that’s left is to figure out how he wants to craft this into a story.

It’s over.

“Yes, please,” he says.

Anna pulls away just far enough to retrieve a pair of sunglasses from the pouch around her waist. How she fought her way down here without breaking them was the kind of mystery even Nick couldn’t solve. Not that Deacon is complaining though. He holds still while she carefully slides them onto his face and then summons up all his bravado to give her a cocky grin.

“How do I look?” he asks.

“You’re hurt.”

“Yes, that’s true, but just ignore it,” he says. “Just … ignore all of this, all right? It’s only you and me, having some fun. None of this other shit happened.”

Anna slowly tilts her head to the side as she considers him.

“Give me a good memory from this,” he breathes, as close to begging as he’s come this entire time.

“Anything you want,” Anna replies.

“Stand up.”

She makes sure he can support himself before she stands, but then she immediately follows his order. Deacon leans forward again, this time resting his cheek against her thigh. It’s so, so good to have control again. He knows Anna will do whatever he wants. Give him whatever he needs. Stop whatever she’s doing the instant he calls red. He can decide what happens next and stop anything he doesn’t like.

Maybe it’s a bit of a fucked up coping mechanism to try to go into a scene immediately after something like this, but lying is what he does best. Making up stories. And now, playing pretend. He wasn’t captured and tortured by raiders. It’s just him and Anna doing a scene. He’s had her tie up his hands before, and kneeling in front of her is a familiar position. Nothing bad or scary at all.

“There’s a bin of water over there,” Deacon tells her, breaking the silence. “And some soap. I think they were using it as a bath too.”

Anna makes a little hum, and he knows she nodded. Her hands stay at her sides, not touching him without permission. She doesn’t pet his face or card her fingers through his hair while she wants for him to tell her what he wants. He doesn’t like having his hair touched, but he’d grown out his real hair because the Institute was gone and he thought he was safe now. The raiders had grabbed it and yanked on it, dragged him by it down the hall, held his head up as they—

“I want you to clean me up and give me a haircut,” Deacon says. “Just use your knife to trim it down the best you can.”

“Да.”

Again, she waits a moment to make sure he’s good kneeling by himself before she moves away. Deacon shuts his eyes while she’s gone and takes a mental stock of his injuries. Anna is trusting that he would have told her if there’s anything that needs to be attended to immediately, but he thinks he’s good. Some cuts down his chest, but they’re shallow. Only meant to scare him. Not much to be done now about the waterboarding. His nose isn’t broken from the hits. Ribs might be cracked, definitely some nasty bruising. That does need a stimpack at some point, but if Anna doesn’t have one on her, he’s not going to call this quits just for that. He knows he’s going to revisit this place in his nightmares, and he’s not leaving until he has another set of memories to counter the first.

“Коснуться?” Anna crouches down in front of him again, and switches to English when he gives her a blank stare, too tired to translate. “Touch?”

“Yeah,” he croaks, then clears his throat. “Green.”

Green, yellow, red. Deathclaw. Stop. That’s actually three different ways to say stop, not counting yellow, only listing the verbal commands. Nonverbally, he could squeeze any part of her body once for yes, twice for no. Tap any part of his body against something for the same result. He could probably lift his leg up and hit his foot against the concrete, now that his legs weren’t tied. He has so many ways to stay safe with Anna.

She wipes a wet rag across his face first, dabbing at the blood in his hairline to check that he doesn’t have a significant head injury. She’s careful with his hair, so he tilts his head any way she wants it while she checks him over. His chest gets examined next, and it turns out she does has a stimpack in her pouch. The bag version with the gel inside it at least. He holds still while she wipes the blood off his chest, then says green for getting the gel rubbed into his aching ribs. It doesn’t hurt to breathe by the time she’s done. She runs her hands up and down his shoulders and arms too, even though she can see that they’re fine. Deacon lets her, eyes drifting shut as he relaxes into being touched. Nothing bad or scary.

Her voice is soft when she speaks. “Haircut.”

Deacon nods. He definitely still wants the haircut, wants it off his head right now. Might even shave it again when he gets back to Sanctuary, but hacking it down into a rough buzz cut will have to do for now. Dyeing it might make him feel better instead. He doesn’t think he can stomach one more person commenting about the color, calling him pretty, making remarks about how they’ve never had a ginger before or asking if all his hair is that red.

“Need to get hair wet,” Anna says. “Stand?”

He gets to his feet with her help, and she leads him over to the bin of water. The back of his head prickles where he keeps expecting to feel a hand grab his hair and shove his head into the water again.

“Turn around,” Anna tells him.

He glances over at her. “Yeah?”

“Will lower you,” she says. “Not get face wet.”

She’s been waterboarded before too. Her parents, the cops. Probably Boris when he trained her. She understands. So he turns around and lets her help him bend over backwards. It’s kind of awkward, especially with his hands still tied behind his back, but basically nothing more than a backbend. He’s attempted much more complicated positions before doing yoga with her in the morning. Definitely going to have to sit that out for the next few days after this, but that means he gets to watch her do yoga. It always surprises him how flexible she is for how tall and muscular she also is. She seems too solid to bend.

Deacon keeps those thoughts firmly in his head as she holds onto him and the back of his head dips into the water. Early morning, she always wakes up too goddamn early. Doing yoga, says it’s to center herself. Light of the sunrise making her hair glow. In the present, Anna cups her hand over his forehead when he straightens back up so water doesn’t run down his face. Out of everything, it’s that tiny protective gesture that makes him tear up, but his secret is safe behind his sunglasses.

“Sit?” Anna asks.

There aren’t any chairs in the room, so it’s back down to the concrete floor. He leans his back against the water bin and tilts his head forward so she can measure out his bangs. The hair-touching still makes his skin crawl, but she’s careful not to tug. Then the knife appears in his peripheral vision. It raises up and harmlessly hacks off his bangs.

Not being dragged down the hall.

Not being waterboarded.

Not losing an eye.

All that shit is just more story fodder. Nothing bad or scary is happening now. Deacon matches his breathing to Anna’s and repeats that to himself while she cuts his hair. He’s almost relaxed by the end of it, even going so far as to lean into her touch when she runs her palm over his head to feel the remains of his shorn-off hair. The knife is sheathed back in her belt, next to her broadsword. He wonders how she fought with that in the narrow hallways, or if she only used the knife. He’d bet on Anna winning if she brought a toothpick to a gunfight; a knife was just an unfair advantage.

“Good?” she asks him.

“Much better.”

Her free hand comes up to lightly brush the backs of her fingers against his nipple, another question. What kind of “good memories” does he want to make here? Deacon considers that. Literally giving the raiders a fuck you. It would certainly be life affirming, and he knows Anna would make it good for him. He could have a different memory of his jaw being held open, put a different taste in his mouth.

But he shies away from that thought with a shudder. No matter how much he loves eating Anna out, that crosses the line into too much. At least right now, in this place, with corpses literally still cooling on the floor.

Deacon takes a deep breath. “I want to go home.”

With another quiet murmur of Да, Anna helps him stand up. He turns and presents his wrists to her, and she cuts off the rope. They spend another minute getting his arms working again, him flexing his fingers while she rubs his wrists. Then she pulls his arm around her shoulder and helps him walk across the room and out the door. None of the raiders on the floor get back up. No one stops him. He doesn’t wake up and realize he dreamed his rescue. He said he wanted to go home and now Anna is taking him home. It’s as simple as that.

He eyes the dead bodies in the various halls and rooms they pass through on their way out. From the way they’ve all been dismembered, it looks like she used a combination of grenades, her knife, and those clawed gauntlets she wears. Their deaths look like they were painful and brutal.

The two of them emerge outside, and Deacon pauses to press his face into her neck for a moment. All the raiders are dead, and he’s walking out alive. The last time one of their settlers had been kidnapped, he’d used Minutemen funds to pay the ransom since Anna had been gone. Not her style at all, but she eventually agreed that it was better than risking the settler getting caught in the crossfire of a rescue, especially when the raiders had a ready-made hostage. At the moment however, he’s definitely appreciating her approach a lot more.

Deacon draws back and tries to act cool again, taking a confident step forward—right into the open chest cavity of a raider. He tenderly withdraws his foot. Anna is silent, and he doesn’t want to ask how she managed that. There’s another raider laying nearby, missing their head. He doesn’t want to ask where that ended up either. The two of them move on in silence, but he spots the decapitated head laying on top of a third raider on the ground, and now he has to ask.

“All right, seriously,” he says. “What was that?”

Anna shrugs. “I ripped his head off and threw it at the other guy hard enough to knock him over the railing.”

Deacon barks out a laugh. “Shit, that’s fucked up. Definitely going into the story version of this.”

He’s glad she’s speaking in full sentences again, grateful that it’s English too. But he’s even happier when he hears a bark right before Dogmeat barrels into them, dancing around them and barking excitedly to see Deacon again. He knows Anna doesn’t like taking her dog into heavy combat situations, and it probably would have been too much to have Dog jumping all over him a couple of minutes ago, but now he’s happy to crouch down and let his buddy slobber on him.

“You ready to go home, boy?” he asks.

Dogmeat barks in response, and Deacon grins.

“Yeah, me too.”


End file.
